Pibble felt his shoes being taken off. This seemed so extraordinary that inquisitiveness overcame the apathy of his fear and he contrived to move his head slowly to a position from which he could just see Singleton low down in the corner of his right eye. The man was leaning against the pillar of a moonlit cloister, removing the pads from his feet, and cramming Pibble’s shoes on—they were at least three sizes too small. Then, carrying the pads, he walked with short steps straight toward the gallows, out of Pibble’s line of vision. After a few seconds he appeared again, not carrying the pads but unwinding a ball of string whose other end was attached to a part of the gallows Pibble couldn’t see; he led the string around a pillar and came back to the gallows, still unwinding it; this time be came straight up the steps of the platform and tied his end of the ball to the beam above Pibble’s head. He moved out of sight and there was a longish pause before Pibble felt his shoes being laced back on again—any chance that a colleague would spot that it was a non-regulation knot, supposing it was? But Singleton was a devil for that sort of detail.
Next, after another short pause, a strange sensation at his fingertips which made him shrivel with terror at the thought that he was being prepared for some agonizing torture. It wasn’t until Singleton had done four fingers that he realized that he was having his fingernails cleaned with the paint of a nail file in case any telltale fragment of skin was still there after the brief fight in the Chinese Room.
So this was to be suicide. The single set of footsteps following the path of the string and then leading straight back to the scaffold would show up under normal police investigation. Presumably the string was fastened to a lever which controlled the trap, and had to be led around the pillar because the lever worked in that direction. Singleton would stand him up, put the noose around his neck, stand beside him on the scaffold, and pull the string; when the long lump of meat and bone had stopped swinging, he would untie the straitjacket and leave the body dangling, the string draped into the trap hole and the triple course of footsteps to show the world how poor Jimmy Pibble, unhinged by the shock of his dealings with the General (they might even work things to show that he had been responsible for the hero’s death), had melodramatically taken his own life.
Could it come off? Not if they brought the whole apparatus of forensic science to scrutinize his death. They’d find the place where the straitjacket had rested on the scaffold, the strained seams of his shoes, the depth of footprint made by a heavier man, even the faint and mysterious indentations where Singleton’s huge pads had plodded across the lawn bearing the weight of two men. All that should be detectable, given the will, but it was a lot of work and bother for an open-and-shut case.
So it all depended on whether they thought Pibble was the type to crack and kill himself. Jimmy Pibble, a bit sensitive—highly strung, you might say—never had the basic drive to make a topflight officer, clever but quirky, wouldn’t put it past him …
Suddenly, with a passion which detached him from the pain and fear of the horrid machine above him, he longed to know that they would put it past him.
“I am not that sort of person,” he gasped, in his ghostly whisper. Singleton hesitated in his manicuring and then moved on, silent, to another nail.
Mrs. Pibble, she’d know, surely. She thought him weak, unambitious, wasteful of his cleverness (which she absurdly overestimated), selfishly neglectful of her, but sane. She’d know he was sane. Too sane to kill himself, even as the last neglect of her. Poor Mary Pibble, she’d had a small, sour life, and she’d find it smaller and sourer tomorrow. And she wouldn’t know what to do about the insurance, though he’d told her fifty times—but Tim Rackham would look after that.
But would Tim listen when she said that her husband would never have committed suicide? Four-fifths of wives say that anyway, felo-de-se being a distinct reflection on the inadequacy of a spouse to make the dead man’s life worth living. What would Tim believe, whom he’d played chess with over beer and bangers and cheese almost every day in the last eight years on which their work had allowed them to lunch near their offices? Tim, who thought that any man’s life was purposeless if he didn’t find four noisy kids rioting about him the moment he got home?
And the Ass. Com.?
As Singleton levered him to his feet, taking care that his hard heels should not scrape along and mark the platform, Pibble found himself praying not to any God but to the Assistant Commissioner of Police, begging that official not to believe that Detective Superintendent James Willoughby Pibble was capable of the crime of self-slaughter.
Singleton, silent on padded feet, lifted him over to the noose; propped him up, and settled the rope around his neck.
“Stand up or you’ll strangle,” said Harvey Singleton, in a detached voice. They were the only words he’d spoken.
He moved off the trap and untied the string. Pibble tried to gather the nerve to throw himself sideways and, at the cost of strangling, leave better pathological evidence of what had happened to his throat before the rope got there. The wrench of the full drop must obliterate all that—there’d been that case of the sergeant in Germany—so … But he couldn’t do it. The muscles of his ankles, the only muscles which the straitjacket allowed him to move, clung despite his mind’s bidding to their last three seconds of life.
Singleton jerked the string.
It snagged on the pillar.
He jerked again, but still the return length hung in its low catenary curve. Without even a cluck of the tongue at the tiresomeness of inanimate things, he retied his end to the beam and padded across the lawn to remove the obstruction. This time Pibble was in control of his ankle muscles, but a faint, absurd hope bade him stand upright.
Singleton reached the moonlit edge of the cloister and pulled the string to one side; it still held. He moved it up and down under slight tension, but achieved nothing. He couldn’t afford to do much waggling, Pibble thought, without producing a suspicious abrasion of the string and fragments of thread caught in the wrong places on the pillar. Singleton seemed to think so, too, for he walked around to the next opening to loosen the string from inside.
Immediately he stepped into the shadow, there was a single sharp thud and he was tossed sprawling out across the grass. A squat gorilla-like figure pounced out of the cloisters onto his body; rolled it over on its front, straddled it, and with a rapid weaving motion lashed the arms together behind the back, then tied the ankles together, then ran another length of what Pibble knew must be camera strap between these two lashings and pulled it taut so that Singleton’s body was bent back into a bow. Singleton didn’t stir; the blow must have been well-aimed and vigorous.
Pibble felt the noose caress the side of his neck and realized with another bout of shock that he was swaying, giddy with fatigue and pain and relief, and with no possible leverage of limbs to regain his balance. He forced his ankles to move him gingerly back to attention and tried to call to his rescuer to hurry, but no sound came. However, the squat figure straightened from its task and trotted up the steps of the platform.
“It is Mr. Pibble,” said Mr. Chanceley. “I reckoned it was you, but I found it difficult to verify in this light. Let me have that cord off of your neck. What’s this you’re wearing?”
“A straitjacket,” gasped Pibble. “I’m extremely grateful to you, Mr. Chanceley.”
“Think nothing of it,” said Mr. Chanceley. “I will be asking a favor of you in the immediate future—I’ll tell you when I’ve untrussed you. You know, first I figured your act was a leg-pull but when I’d studied the setup awhile I guessed you wasn’t play-acting, neither of you. So I knotted his piece of cord around a nail and waited for him. I reckoned I could shout or discommode him if he tried to pull that lever direct.”
“He’s a very dangerous man,” said Pibble.
“And I was All American tackle, Idaho, afore I shifted down to Texas. You have a sore neck, Mr. Pibble.”
“Yes,” whispered Pibble. “He laid me out by throttling me and then he brought me down here to fake a suicide. The rope would have hidden the earlier bruises.”
“I heard you say you were down here on a job,” said Mr. Chanceley, with a shade of query in his flat voice.
“I’m a policeman, and I was investigating a suicide which turned out to be a murder, I think. That’s Mr. Harvey Singleton.”
“Yeah,” said Mr. Chanceley. “I spoke with him already.” The voice held a hint of social reproach; as though Pibble had committed a gaffe. He remembered the square, purple-clad figure arguing with Singleton under the fountain while the crowd milled into the coaches; remembered, too, how absurd he had seemed then.
“I hit him with my camera,” said Mr. Chanceley, as if pointing out the poetic justice of the implement. “It is shock-proof, naturally. I reckon he’ll live. Now, Mr. Pibble, you may consider you’re a mite in my debt, but you can set the record straight before we take him to the cells. I missed the picture of my life to fetch you out of that mess, but we can set it up again, and better, too. I have this experimental film, ultra-fast, nothing like it on sale anywhere in the world, and, like the slogan says, ‘It Takes Movies by Moonlight.’ Now, Mr. Pibble, you and your pal were posed, ab-so-lutely posed, for the greatest moonlight shot in history, but I couldn’t take it, first because I left my silent camera at my hotel, and second because I had to get you out of the fix you were in.”
“I’ll gladly put my head into the noose again for you, Mr. Chanceley,” said Pibble, “but I’m afraid we’ll have to do without the executioner.”
“Nuts,” said Mr. Chanceley. “I have a timing device for my camera. I’ll strip off and be the hangman—I have more the figure for it than your Mr. Singleton, too.”
He had already, while waiting in ambush, divested himself of his festooning gadgetry. Now he threw his blazer on the lawn, whisked his necktie off, and began to pull his shirt over his head, talking as he did so.
“We’ll move fast. If I know photography—and I do, Mr. Pibble—that beautiful big moon will fade behind a cloud if we give her one moment’s grace. Now, see here: I’ll aim my camera to take in the steps and a little bit of lawn this side, as well as the scaffold. You take off your coat and necktie, Mr. Pibble, but leave your shirt open at the neck. You don’t say it has a detachable collar? Holy Mother of Jesus, this is my lucky night. Take the collar off and you’ll look real antique. That white shirt is fine, and your face is nigh as white as your shirt—you’re sure this ain’t asking too much of you, Mr. Pibble? Then I’ll lead you up the steps with your hands strapped behind you; you’ll turn and kneel and say a prayer; I’ll jerk you up and put the noose around your neck and make like I’m going to pull the lever. Then you can step off the trap and we’ll have it open. I found a crate in there”—he jerked his thumb toward the cloisters—“and we’ll put it under the trap for you to stand on. Then you can go down slow, bending at the knees, while I pull the lever again slow. I can splice the pieces I need to make it seem quick when I run the film. We’ll have twelve minutes and thirty seconds before the film runs out, so we should do it easy.”
“Fine,” said Pibble, reflecting that Mr. Chanceley and Mr. Singleton made a very near match for rapid and detailed planning. The Texan fetched a small crate from the cloisters and hid it behind the scaffold. Pibble watched him wonderingly: half naked, with the build and musculature of a real Jack Ketch, his trouser ends tucked into his socks to simulate tights, he looked like a natural force which nothing short of annihilation would deter from its ends. How easy it would have seemed to another man to wash his hands of the humane aspects of the scene, perhaps to take a still or two of Singleton pulling the lever and Pibble undergoing the drop when the lens click would be drowned by other noises. How many dedicated photographers get the chance to snap a real murder by hanging? The temptation must have been like a flood tide. Juicy blackmail afterward, too. No question of not being allowed to photograph the Abbey by moonlight, either, and then to milk the publicity for all it was worth.
Mr. Chanceley fiddled and fussed over his tripod. Pibble put his coat back on while he waited; he felt as cold as he had while brooding over Deakin’s body—suddenly he remembered Mr. Waugh lying stertorous in the dank shadow under the Private Wing, rheumatism seeping every second into those alcoholic joints. As Mr. Chanceley straightened from his adjustments, Harvey Singleton groaned. Pibble bent to look at the thongs; they seemed firm enough for anything.
“Let him bide,” said Mr. Chanceley. “You ready now, Mr. Pibble?”
Pibble took off his coat, let his wrists be bound behind his back, and followed Mr. Chanceley up to the scaffold. The camera whirred in the dimness. He hung his head disconsolately so that he could see where the knotty muscles bulged on the square slab of his rescuer’s back. He knelt at the top of the steps and praised the Assistant Commissioner for his manifold mercies. He was hauled to his feet, stood on the trap, and again felt the harsh caress of the noose. For a crazy moment he was certain that Mr. Chanceley would be carried away by the histrionic art and would pull the lever—hard to make a motive like that stand up in court.
Then there was the juggling with the crate; slowly he did a full knee bend; when the rope was taut, he allowed his head to sag to one side while he tilted his chin upward and forward. It hurt like hell, but he owed Mr. Chanceley that much.
Harvey Singleton, when they came back to him, was threshing on the lawn like a landed salmon.
“Just let me dress,” said Mr. Chanceley, “and we’ll put him into that straitjacket.”
Pibble went and fetched the thing, wondering whether it could be made to fit so different-shaped a man, but found that it was most ingeniously designed to suit any size of customer: there were webbing straps at the back which served the dual purpose of adjusting the scope of its embrace and tightening its grip until the victim could not even wriggle. There was a label inside the collar—it said “Army and Navy Stores.”
“I’d best lay him out again,” said Mr. Chanceley. “We’ll have one hell of a wrestle getting him into that thing otherwise.”
He swung his camera in a sharp arc, producing the same thud as Pibble had heard before. The long body jerked and lay still.
“Holy Mother of Jesus,” said Mr. Chanceley as he undid the thongs. “You seen anything like that before, Mr. Pibble?” Pibble knelt and looked. The leather had cut into Singleton’s wrists so that they were welling with blood and the hands were as puffy as kidneys. Pibble tore up strips of the footpads and bandaged the wounds. Then, while Mr. Chanceley was untying the ankles, he went through Singleton’s pockets, finding a big ring of keys, a small automatic pistol, a wallet, and a roll of tape from a tape recorder. He pocketed these and helped roll the unconscious man into the straitjacket and adjust the straps as tight as they dared. He was still terrified of Singleton; the threshing had been a final desperate effort to get a hand to the pistol, and even with his arms strapped behind his back he might have managed to use it—he was that sort of man.
“Where now?” said Mr. Chanceley.
Pibble took the map Singleton had given him out of his pocket and peered at it by the light of the moon.
“I don’t fancy going back to the House,” he said. “I don’t know how much Mrs. Singleton is involved in all this, and the place is full of guns; they might try anything. But there’s a car up in the staff car park—it looks about five hundred yards—if one of us can drive it. It’s an E-Type Jaguar.”
“Boy, oh boy!” said Mr. Chanceley. “Is this my lucky night! If you’ll carry my equipment, Mr. Pibble, I’ll carry the prisoner.”
“Are you sure you can manage?” said Pibble. “I don’t think he’d get out if we left him here.”
“I’ll be happier if I know he’s with us,” said Mr. Chanceley. He hoicked Singleton up by the shoulders, tilting him onto his feet like a man tipping a log end o
ver end, bent, and caught him neatly at the point of balance on his broad shoulder.
“My cameras are under the archway there,” he said. “Bring what you can carry, and maybe I’ll have time to come back for the rest. I’ll start off—you reckon it’s this track, Mr. Pibble?” He trudged into the dark with his lethal burden. Pibble picked up the bloody straps and carried them into the cloister, where he found an untidy ziggurat of leather, glass, and chrome. It took him several minutes to thread the straps into the right buckles and to load himself up. Not a dressy man, he was still concerned lest the providential Mr. Chanceley should feel he was carrying the gear in an inappropriate manner.
He found him propping his burden up at a point where the path forked.
“You made it,” said Mr. Chanceley. “Where now?”
“Left,” said Pibble, glad that he’d taken an extra half minute to learn the route off. Mr. Chanceley slung Singleton up onto his shoulder without a grunt.
“Be careful how you handle him,” said Pibble. “I managed to bite his ear when he was lifting me.”
“He tries that on me,” said Mr. Chanceley, “and I have his eye out. I was a Minuteman, back home, before they went soft, and I learned unarmed combat.”
The load of photographic equipment suddenly seemed heavier as Pibble came to terms with the knowledge that his rescuer was not merely a semi-literate American figure of fun, but a supporter of the extreme right wing to boot. But an honest man, he thought. An honest man. An honest man. The load became no lighter, but at least he could carry it.
The Old English Peep Show Page 18
